Shotgun Players: Babes in Ho-lland

Recently I was at a Sunday performance of Shotgun Players' world premiere production of Babes in Ho-lland by Deneen Reynolds-Knott, directed by Leigh Rondon-Davis. It is the story of two Black women students in the largely white environment of the University of Pittsburgh (the Ho-lland of the title is a joking reference to a dorm on campus) in the 1990s: Ciara (Sundiata Ayinde), a freshman from a middle-class background (her mother works in finance) living in the dorms, & Taryn (Tierra Allen), a sophomore from a less financially stable background, living off campus, who fall in love with each other. There is a third character: Kat (Ciera Eis), a sort of grunge-goth-adjacent white girl who is Ciara's roommate.

Here's the short version: the performers are fine, the play is sweet, but dull. I think I read somewhere that it would be 90 minutes without intermission. That would be stretching it a bit, but OK. Then at the theater we were told it would be two hours & ten minutes, including a ten-minute intermission. The show ended up being two & a half hours. I've seen productions of Macbeth that are shorter. Before I go into how thin the material was stretched to fill that time, I'm going to talk about my experience in the theater.

We bring our baggage into the theater with us; ideally, the play will lighten our loads in some way: make us laugh, or think, or even just forget whatever we need to forget at the moment. The last few years in particular have been difficult ones for me – & for the world at large, of course, but I'm talking about my individual situation. I won't go into the details, because it's not the kind of thing I discuss here, but I'll summarize by saying when someone I know sent me a Christmas text wishing me "merriment & brightness coming my way" my immediate & visceral reaction was, Why are you making fun of me? Then I realized he wasn't; I'm just not expecting merriment & brightness from . . . well, anything.

So I went into the theater with that, hoping I would enjoy the play. If I weren't basically an optimist I wouldn't keep going to the theater, right?

It was a mask-mandatory matinee, which leads to the first incident. I took my seat in the front row, mask firmly in place (I am very careful about observing such rules). Between allergies & medication, my throat gets dry, which leads to coughing. Since that would disrupt a performance, I carry a small bottle of water in my messenger bag. While waiting for the show to start & without thinking much of it, I took the bottle out of my bag, briefly half-undid my mask, took a quick glug, put the mask back on, & replaced the bottle in my bag. Before I could finish putting the bottle back (please note I never fully took off my mask, & replaced it before putting the bottle away – I later timed myself doing this & the whole sequence takes about two minutes, during only about half of which time my mask is partly down), I heard screeching behind me: "TAKE THAT OUTSIDE!!!!: I was facing the stage, so I turn around, & there, quivering with rage, is a short pile of unruly grey curls in a lumpy tie-dyed sweatshirt. "What are you talking about?" I said. "TAKE THAT OUTSIDE!!!! THIS IS A MASKED MATINEE!!!!" I point out to the trembling troll that I am wearing a mask (by then it was fully back on). She kept screeching. She had been sitting in almost the back row of the theater. That means she must have charged down the stairs the minute I started reaching into my bag. (If I was exuding harmful viruses, wouldn't it be safer to stay back where she was? But of course safety isn't the point.) Best of all, in order to come down to where I was in the front row, she had to pass a woman who was sitting several rows behind me, blatantly flouting the mask policy: her mask was down around her chin & she was leisurely sipping her cup of coffee. The tie-dyed troll kept screeching at me, even though I was, let me reiterate, already fully masked with my water put away, so I'm not sure what more she wanted. Finally I nodded to the maskless woman, who must have heard what was going on but just kept sitting there, & said, "Are you going to go yell at her?" "YES I AM" she said, but of course she didn't yell; she quietly mentioned that it was a masked matinee & she should take her coffee outside (which the woman did).

I guess technically I did violate the rule, though I didn't even think of it that way as I was only partially exposed for a minute or two. I didn't even think of what I was doing as "drinking", I thought of it as "preventing a coughing fit". I certainly understand the exasperation & frustration of seeing people ignore the rules. But if you're so tightly wound about masking that a momentary & partial exposure on the other side of a substantial space is going to make you lose it completely, maybe you shouldn't be sitting in a theater audience quite yet. But of course the masking wasn't the point. The point was to scream at a man (I can state this firmly, as she ignored the mask-down woman until I made a point of it, & that's a fairly typical example of how my male "privilege" works for me). I'm so used to bizarre levels of hostility from random strangers that it wasn't even until the next day that it occurred to me she could have simply said something to me, or alerted the house manager, without screaming. I think she actually did alert the house manager, as I saw her poke her head in a few minutes later & scan my row, obviously looking for the law-breaker. Since my mask was firmly back on before the troll had finished her first screech, well, I'm not sure what she thought her point was. (For the record, during the performance people around me were lowering their masks to eat cookies. I know this because the cookies were wrapped in cellophane.)

So after that random attack I'm standing there at my front row aisle seat, still waiting for the show to start (I get places early). A white-haired woman sits next to me, eyes me up & down, & announces to me that we're in the movable chairs (the other rows are basically church pews) & I could easily move my seat over & the theater wouldn't even notice. I just stared at her. I am extremely careful about respecting other people's space, a courtesy that is often not reciprocated or even recognized. Moving my chair over would in fact have partially blocked the stairs, making it difficult for people going up or down. I hadn't even sat down. I don't know what her problem was, other than my existence.

Then, during the performance, the woman directly behind me, when not talking to her companion, grunted & moaned in agreement with any "political" points, & . . . sang along with the songs. She sang along. & there were a lot of songs in this show.

So let me move on to the show, starting with the music, which the theater kept highlighting. Pop music from the 1990s means absolutely nothing to me. Given the age of most of the rest of my audience (even older than I am), I can't believe it means much to them, either: maybe their children listened to it? I didn't hate it, but I sure didn't feel I'd missed anything by not hearing it before. The music helps define the personalities of the three (Kat in particular listens to more rock-type stuff), but once that point is made . . . well, it keeps being made, & then made again (hence the extended run time; anytime action threatens to develop, on goes the CD player). Sometimes the young women dance along or lip-synch the words. I can't even remember if they actually play air guitar or if I was just plunged back into the embarrassment of watching fellow dorm-dwellers do so: after your initial grin, to show you think they're so cool, when they keep going on, what do you do but pretend to still have a reaction while your soul slips away, its place taken by crushing emptiness & boredom? At least in the theater it doesn't matter if you don't have a reaction. You can just sit back, blank-faced, basking in the stereophonic stylings of the random woman behind you singing along in her very average voice to songs you've never heard of.

Speaking of familiarity, easily the biggest reaction of the evening came when Ciara says she wants to go into journalism & be on a TV show where she can make Pat Buchanan cry. Big laughs & applause for that – this aging Berkeley audience may not know Courtney Love from a Hole in the ground, but we know & despise Pat Buchanan!

The thought of a student in the mid-1990s wanting to go into journalism made me wonder why no one did the obvious thing with this material: compress the whole thing into a first act (under an hour) & then write a second act, set in current times, updating us on these three characters. If nothing else, maybe we could find out what happens to their sense of self when the music they use to define themselves turns into oldies or "classic hits" or nostalgia.

So these two young women fall in love, & that's kind of sweet, of course. But there's really no conflict as they slide together. Ciara is the less experienced of the two, but she doesn't have much angst over falling in love with another woman – the whole "Oh my God, am I . . . that way?!?" drama, & the coming-out drama, are a bit passé on the stage, though not in life. The two women don't run up against much homophobia. Kat is cool with it, as a young woman like her would be. There is racism, but mostly of the "white people are clueless" kind rather than the overtly hostile kind. At one point, when Taryn has financial problems, Kat asks about her scholarship. Both Taryn & Ciara are immediately offended by this. I was puzzled, as Taryn's financial problems have been a running theme & it seems unsurprising that she would receive financial aid, but apparently there's a racist thing I had not even heard of, in which all Black students are assumed to have scholarships "for diversity". Is this a variant on "you're only here because of affirmative action?" But the affirmative action thing is more insulting & the scholarship assumption is more along the lines of well-meaning but clueless. This is the sort of portrayal of racism that lets the Berkeley audience off the hook – we are so much more sensitive than that young woman! It was one of several points when the woman behind me grunted & "mmmm'ed" loudly to let everyone know she totally got it. (Do I even need to clarify that this woman was white? as was most of the audience.)

Taryn is portrayed as relentlessly cool: she wants to be a social worker! She loves kids, & they love her right back! She is pals with all the service workers on campus! Her mac & cheese is fire! She goes to poetry slams! She listens to the coolest beats! She sneers at people who watch Friends! She plays a mean game of pool! Her Granddad taught her, because her family is so close! When they party, the neighbors don't complain, they party with them!

The play is weirdly reluctant to criticize or question her. But let's look at some of these things, starting with palling around with the service workers: she & Ciara have a conversation about this. Ciara says these people are just doing their jobs. Taryn gives her a little lecture (one of several she gives, meant to enlighten Ciara & presumably us) about how her Mom worked at a hotel reception desk & some guests treated her like dirt but others were courteous because they knew she could make or break their vacation (yeah, Taryn, we know; we've all seen Fight Club). Ciara has no response & clearly has been both thrown for a loop & shown the light. But there's a pretty big spectrum of behavior between treating people like dirt & being friends who have lengthy conversations with them while they're working. Sometimes respect means letting people do their jobs, or realizing that maybe they're not there to give you a rounded social life, or even that they may not like you that much.

Here's an example from years ago in my working life: I was at a job where my desk was a bit out of the way. You could get to it, but you had to go around some low cubicle dividers that kind of walled off the area. So when the man would come around to empty our wastebaskets, I would pick mine up & carry it over to him. This was mostly to be helpful but also partly because it allowed me to move from my desk. One time when I did this, he thanked me & said I was the only person who handed him the basket like that. English was not his first language, or one he spoke well, so saying that was an effort for him. I thanked him. I was glad I could do that for him & show him that sign of respect. But we never were pals, the way Taryn is with the campus crew. I didn't feel I should take up his time with chat mostly designed to show how cool I am for talking to him. (Most people would assume I was, at least financially/economically, the privileged person there. I'm not sure that's accurate. I was unable to find a full-time job & so was working one in a series of long-term temp jobs at the same company, for which I basically received no benefits, only my salary – after the temp agency had regularly skimmed a huge amount off the top, in return for nothing but issuing me a check every other week. My bosses always wanted to hire me but HR kept insisting they had a "hiring freeze". It's possible the man who picked up the trash at least had a full-time job with some benefits. I mention this to underline how ambiguous & deceptive appearances of power & status can often be, in life though not in this play.)

Another point about palling around with the service workers: for all the dramaturgical talk of "intersectionality", Taryn's lecture, as well as the rest of the play, doesn't really seem to have any comprehension of how it would actually work. To take an obvious example, a man chatting up a service worker (particularly a woman worker) is going to be read differently from another woman doing that. (I once had a conversation with a retired librarian, a woman, about killing time before shows in Civic Center. She told me that she liked to go to the children's section of the SF Public Library & read, and "you're really not supposed to be there without a child, but they don't mind if you're reading the children's books." &, not for the first time, I thought, Oh, should I tell the nice lady why she can do that & a man can't?) There will be complicated cross-currents depending on the race of the person, & the age, &, of course, personality. & in a college setting, there's an inherent barrier between the students & the service workers, no matter how much some of the students may like to pretend there isn't.

Here's another example: Taryn lives in a house off-campus. She has trouble making her rent. She tries to make up for it by making her roommates occasional dinners (as mentioned, her mac & cheese is fire!). Eventually they have a house-meeting to let her know they can't keep carrying her rent & other bills & she needs to move on. She is a bit resentful but basically understanding. But we've all known or heard about people like this –people who owe money but provide some lesser service as compensation – & generally they tend to think that what they're doing should carry full weight. But of course to those to whom money is owed, it doesn't. Taryn isn't given that flaw, of course, as she is not given flaws. But the whole "I make them dinner" thing raised questions for me: who cleans up? who pays for the ingredients? If she's paying, I'm sure the roommates are thinking, "How come you can buy all this but can't pay your bills?" If anything, the dinners would make them feel guilty & resentful, though we don't hear any inkling of that. But they're also students, & why should they pay her bills as well as their own, despite the deliciousness of her mac & cheese?

Are there class & racial considerations here? We never find out, of course. The roommates never appear & we are given no details about them, other than that they are also students. Dorm residents other than Kat also never appear (not even to complain about the loud music late at night). I understand the economics behind having very small casts (three people is actually larger than in many other new plays I've seen), but if you're concerned about presenting & respecting many voices, you can't have said voices mediated through the filter of the two or three people we actually hear from on stage.

At one point Taryn, whom Ciara has been treating when they go out, wants to reciprocate, because suddenly she has money. Ciara asks where she got it, Taryn, it turns out, has signed up for a cash-advance card (she doesn't seem to know quite what it is or how it works). This happens at the point in the evening when they have to have a fight of some sort; everything has been mostly frictionless up to now, but something has to happen to produce some tension, so Ciara starts telling her how insidious those cards are, Taryn gets offended ("my mom uses them & you're calling my mom stupid!"), & she flees. Of course they soon re-unite, & Ciara apologizes (!!!), says she could hear her mother speaking through her & regrets that (!!!!!!), & Taryn grudgingly accepts her apology because deep, deep down she is sure Ciara meant well (!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!). Ciara, honey: Your mother is right. Cards like that are one of the predatory ways financial institutions take advantage of people who are financially ignorant (not the same thing as stupid) or desperate for income. But that issue will not be addressed here. It's downright weird that Ciara is presented as the one at fault here, & typical of both the play's reluctance to interrogate Taryn & its superficial handling of any actual social issues, which is what I meant by putting "political" in quotation marks above. (We never do find out how Taryn managed to pay off the card or whether she continued to run into debt.) I understand that this is meant to be a positive portrayal of queer Black love, & that's great, but it achieves that positive feeling by skating swiftly over any unpleasantness. You know, the same thing that happens in real life!

One feels a certain amount of pressure to love this play: Women telling women's stories! Queer joy! Black joy! Queer Black joy! (Joy is very zeitgeisty). But the pressure to offer positive stories means much of what gives our lives texture &, you know, drama is elided here. We don't even know if the two women stay together after Taryn has to drop out of college at the end of the play. Looking back on freshman / sophomore year of college from a more aged perspective, how many such relationships last, especially when one party drops out of college & moves away? The class differences between the two women aren't made much of, & neither is Taryn's greater sexual experience. In fact the relationship that rang truest to me is the one between Ciara & Kat: initially Ciara thinks Kat is cool & different, then gradually she grows disillusioned with how self-centered & ultimately conventional she is; Kat is always going on about & mooning over her boyfriend, who is of course off-stage so we never see his perspective, but apparently he's ready to move on & she can't accept that. Towards the end of the school year & the play, Kat, pretending to be drunker than she is, propositions Ciara, in one of the few really dramatic events in this show. Ciara is disgusted by this & fed up with Kat in general, so she blocks off her side of the dorm room. That's what happens in the spring: the roommate you thought was hip & interesting in the fall is a bore & a burden by spring. But I can see Kat & Ciara gradually becoming some sort of friends in the future. I'm less sure of Ciara & Taryn; the happy ending here seems more like an artificial stop so that we don't have to experience their future troubles, or even just their drifting apart under the pressures of the different directions in which their lives have taken them.

All in all, an unsatisfying evening & an unsatisfying end to a very mixed season at Shotgun Players.

sounds and sweet airs

A couple of weeks ago, when I was starting to come down with the flu, I did manage to fool myself into thinking I was well enough to get out to Berkeley for the Cal Performances presentation of Delfeayo Marsalis Octet performing Sweet Thunder, which turned out to be a fortunate self-deception since I would have hated to miss this outstanding concert (though I could have done without the three rude stupid girls also in Row J who kept their cell phones on the entire performance; apparently they felt the pre-concert announcement that all electronic devices should be turned off did not apply to very special people like them; sadly I could not, for a number of reasons, either say anything to them or move; I could only contemplate the fathomless blithe stupidity of people).

Anyway. Sweet Thunder is an adaptation for octet of the orchestral suite Such Sweet Thunder, composed by Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn and inspired by Shakespeare. Given the artists involved it's not surprising that this is a wonderful, freewheeling, and inventive piece, moving selectively among the vast possibilities of Shakespeare, touching some unexpected points (I wouldn't have thought that Henry V was particularly inspirational to anyone, but there's a lively and somewhat obstreperous Sonnet to Hank Cinq (a name which is typical of Ellington's offhand wit and elegance)). Ellington and Strayhorn seemed particularly drawn to unhappy love (pieces  on Romeo and Juliet, Cleopatra, and the confused quartet of Midsummer Night), madness (Hamlet and Ophelia, Lady Macbeth), or both (Othello).

Marsalis gave brief, useful insights into each piece, with offhand charm; he sounded completely spontaneous, though he must have planned what to say. Before playing Lady Mac he mentioned that people could bring craziness and even madness on themselves; "That's true!" proclaimed the loud woman behind me. Marsalis gave some useful tips on the clever structure of the pieces, noting that the three "sonnets" (besides the Sonnet to Hank Cinq we heard the Sonnet in Search of a Moor and the Sonnet to Caesar) were constructed, in tribute to the traditions of the sonnet form, in fourteen ten-beat lines. He also noted the difference between Strayhorn and Ellington, with the former more structured and "written" and the latter more improvisational and eclectic.

Marsalis can make his trombone speak like a character, from wails and shrieks to low laments to martial swagger to a lover's bravado. Such speaking instruments can really do justice to the richness of Shakespeare's characters. The rest of the band was equally dazzling: Mark "Preacherman" Gross on tenor and soprano saxophone, Jeff Clayton on alto saxophone, Jamelle Williams on trumpet, Oliver Bonie on baritone saxophone, Glen Pearson on piano, David Pulphus on bass, and Winard Harper on drums. I went in expecting Shakespeare, Ellington, and Strayhorn to be great, but I left convinced that Delfeayo Marsalis had done them proud.

Beethoven waves us off

Running in place trying to keep up though always falling behind as usual, I might as well start with the final concert I heard in the San Francisco Symphony's centennial season and work backwards through some symphonic nights. . . .

My ticket for the big season finale was for the Thursday performance, so my original plan was to spend the time after work and before the concert at the Asian Art Museum taking a closer look at the Phantoms of Asia show. Unfortunately for me, that Thursday turned out to be one of the museum's silly and annoying monthly party nights, though I guess it was fortunate I found out beforehand so I could give the museum a very wide berth, since this particular party featured (1) "litquake," (2) Trannyshack, (3) some tattoo thing, and (4) a DJ. Any one of those four elements would have sent me screaming into the dark night, but the combination of all four promised to fill the museum with enough smug self-regard and general hipster-douchebag-asshattery to reach suffocatingly toxic levels. In fact the slightest event - a carelessly dropped name, the fizz when some inked hackjob popped open his ironic Pabst Blue Ribbon - could easily react with some dragonish drag queen's acid "Oh honey" or the shrill relentless thumping of trendoid world music to trigger an implosion in the building that would bring it crashing down (as Samson brought the temple crashing down on the heads of the Philistines), with nothing surviving in the wreck except perhaps some fragment of an unobserved impassive Buddha, his hand raised in ambiguous blessing, his lips curved in an enigmatic smile.

So anyway the need to avoid the Asian Art Museum meant I had to rearrange my plans for the hours before the start of the concert. I did go to the SF Museum of Modern Art for a while, even though I had already been there earlier that day during my lunch hour. I don't like the cafeteria there, so I left after about an hour and walked up Market Street to Pearl's Deluxe Burgers, which I had never been to before and which is in the area of Market Street that the city has been desperately trying to gentrify for years. They're not quite there yet. My food was perfectly acceptable but the tables were surprisingly grimy and the generic loud music was irritating though not unexpected. A couple of street people talked loudly in the back, their possession-stuffed handcarts leaning against their table. Glassy-eyed and angry-looking folks, some street people, some office workers, floated by right outside the window. My dinner started to sit heavily in my stomach. I thought despondently of the healthier, tastier, and less expensive dinner I would have had at the Asian. I glumly wondered if I should bother renewing my museum membership. The best time for working people to visit there is Thursday evening, but they don't even have the late hours during the winter months (prime concert-attending season) and the rest of the year they frequently sabotage Thursday nights with their attempts to turn themselves into a ghastly third-rate nightclub, something I can easily get elsewhere were I so minded, unlike the chance to look at Asian art, which I can only get there. It's part of a sad trend among cultural institutions to throw away what they're actually good for in favor of interchangeable, irritating parties aimed at people who aren't really much interested in art. I'm not sure I'm really getting value from my membership.

Eventually I headed out into the drifting crowds, back down Market Street to Davies Hall, with hamburger, onion rings, and milkshake heavy in my stomach, still with well over an hour before the concert was to start, and nothing much to do. The big item on the program was the Beethoven 9, one of those pieces whose very greatness has led to a sort of cynical ennui among concert-goers who roll their eyes at riding such a familiar warhorse. But for me at least it's not something I've heard live that often (recordings are something else). In fact the only other time I remember hearing it live was for the centennial of the Boston Symphony, in a big free public concert on Boston Common. The park was mobbed, of course, and I ended up stuck next to a woman who talked loudly during the entire performance. She could not restrain her laughter and gleeful horror at the terrible gaucherie of those who applauded between movements. "Talk about the pot calling the kettle black," muttered a man next to me, so I was not the only victim of her presence who noted the irony in her mocking disapproval of bad concert behavior.

I was quite excited to hear this symphony live, perched as it is on the summit of several traditions, like some fantastical composite beast, lashing its strange choral tail toward heaven. The first part of the program was two short pieces by Ligeti and Schoenberg, both of whom I love, and both performed by the Symphony's superb chorus. I thought the pieces were very well chosen to complement the Beethoven: Ligeti's Lux aeterna, using the ancient words from the requiem mass, and Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, mixing an eyewitness account from the Holocaust with the ancient prayer Shema Yisroel, look both backward and forward, combining daring musical invention with humanity's oldest and most basic questions about justice and meaning in the universe; they memorialize yet also move us forward: perfect accompaniments to Beethoven's final symphony.

There I was in my front row center seat, excited about the program, and pleased to see that the program-rustlers who usually sit next to me for this subscription series were nowhere in sight, and then, right before the lights dimmed, an incredibly enormous man sinks slowly into the seat on my left, and even though there is a double armrest on my right I am pinned to the far side of my seat by this meat-mountain and his swollen fleshbag limbs. Since I am very careful about not imposing on the space of others I felt equally constricted on my right side, since I'm pushed all the way over there, though the little old woman sitting on my right seemed cheerfully oblivious, humming a bit and tapping along to the more sombre moments in the Schoenberg and the Beethoven. Now instead of being a bit peeved that the first half is so short I am deeply grateful, since I cannot move. The Ligeti is dense yet ethereal. I think that Shuler Hensley's narration in the Schoenberg is not the way I would have done it - it's maybe a bit too obviously dramatic - but that's how Schoenberg wrote it, and the ultimate effect is very powerful, and I'm having trouble breathing since I don't even have room to cross my arms over my chest, my usual space-saving expedient, because I am so crammed into this seat by the vast implacable imperturbable wall of flesh beside me.

During intermission I look around and there are no empty seats, so I have no choice if I want to hear the Beethoven but to sit back down in what is available of the seat I paid for. Again, I can't move; I can't even put both arms by my sides because there's no room. I have to let my right arm hang down onto my lap, with my left hand holding on somewhere near my bicep to keep my left arm out of my neighbor's way, and I can't move from that position. I realize at one point that my eyeglasses have become smeared (most likely by my eyelashes) but I can't move my arms well enough to wipe them off. I really hate it when my glasses aren't clean. I'm feeling very claustrophobic, pinned in by a solid wall of inert flesh, seeing the orchestra through a misty smudge on my lenses. I hear the music as in a dream. I have an impression of a very fine performance of the familiar strains. The soloists (Erin Wall, Kendall Gladen, William Burden, and Nathan Berg), are all very fine, but long before Joy, the daughter of Elysium, spread her soft wings I could feel my entire left side slowly but surely going completely numb.

I have sat through more physically excruciating concerts at Davies Hall than anywhere else I've ever been. And it's not like Bayreuth, where you suffer on those hard seats but the sound is incomparable. You will not be compensated for your steerage-quality seating by beauty of either sound or surroundings. I just don't know what it is about that place (besides poor design). Maybe I just have bad luck there? Sometimes you'll read someone (usually someone associated with the Symphony) talking about what a wonderful hall it is, and I am befuddled and bemused and touched and saddened.

I had the feeling that the symphony was flashing before me the way a vast golden sun might finally flash setting on a sparkling green sea in a drowning man's last vision, only I was being drowned in enclosing suffocating waves of encroaching human flesh. The last note of the music had barely sounded when the man behind me immediately leaned forward and loudly screamed bravi! right in my ear. (I'll give him credit, though: he only kicked the back of my seat a couple of times. At least the kicks indicated I hadn't lost all feeling back there.) I leaned forward in my turn and suddenly realized I could take advantage of the tumultuous applause to jump to my feet, which I promptly did, joining the sincere ovation with special gratitude for my release. But I still felt so clamped in and claustrophobic that I couldn't even stand there applauding; usually I'm one of the last to leave the hall but I was so anxious for movement that as soon as Michael Tilson Thomas and the soloists left the stage I bolted to the side aisle and practically ran to the back of the house before the aisles were crammed with the lumbering herds and I was trapped again. I think only once before in my whole concert-going life have I left before the house-lights were turned up, and that was after a very long opera when I would otherwise have missed the last train. So I felt troubled by fleeing but also compelled to escape.

The Symphony was recording the performances for a future CD release, so perhaps I'll get to hear the performance under less grueling conditions, though given the several loud coughs during the quietest sections I'm not sure they'll use the performance I heard. And the Symphony continues its inexplicable policy of not using surtitles for the vocal parts, so of course during the Ode to Joy there was much rustling of programs among those who could actually use their arms.

And here's my little O Henry ending: the train home was a long time coming, but at least it was a full-length train. I took my seat in the first car, grateful to have no one beside me, but after two stops the entire train filled up with people returning from the Giants game, so there was no place to move to, and another, even fatter, man plopped down next to me, pinning me into my seat. Once I managed to get off the train even the empty nighttime sidewalks seemed barely enough restorative space, and I longed to be alone on an endless silent prairie under the canopy of stars that Schiller and Beethoven had been trying to point out to us.

Leif Ove Andsnes in Nighttown

This is last night. I am once again sitting in a darkened room (this time it’s Herbst Theater) once again listening to someone play piano (this time it’s Leif Ove Andsnes, and he’s playing Haydn – the Piano Sonata in C minor, Hob.XVI:20, to be specific). No introductory talks this time, for which I am as always grateful, since I’ve already had to wait until 8:00 for the performance to start – thank God it’s Thursday, and I can wander through the Asian Art Museum beforehand. The lights dim as always and he comes out, looking youthful and self-possessed. He is fairly slight of build and I wonder how many times he’s been described as “boyishly handsome.” I wonder how old he is. I’m enjoying the Haydn, of course. The program said he had just become a father, but who knows what age that is. I wonder if I’ve heard him before – wait, I am pretty sure I heard him with I think Christian Tetzlaff, also in Herbst, but a few years ago, and I was up in the balcony because G/S gave me his ticket and I mostly remember the seat being so narrow I was very conscious of not moving so I didn’t disturb those around me. Disturbing – there is an awful lot of coughing going on, much more than usual. SF Performances audiences are usually fairly well behaved, though there was that guy who moved behind me for the second half of Maltman who cleared his throat constantly, while his friend kept kneeing the back of my chair. What is wrong with people. I wonder how many times a day I think that, or have it thought about me. What is going on in the back of the theater – it sounds as if some woman has dumped the entire contents of her purse, not once but twice. Andsnes barely reacts but I see that look flit across his face. Yo-Yo Ma, back in Boston, in Jordan Hall, playing the Bach solo cello suites, when what sounded like a handful of coins fell out of somebody’s something and rolled down the floor – that look of frustration repressed on his face. I wish I always remembered the music sounds as vividly as I remember the interrupting sounds. Like that horrible woman a few years ago here at Herbst who brought her nasty little dog (what was the performance? I wish I could remember that and not the dog) and claimed it was a helper dog so no one could stop her. So rude. Since that little rodent fit in her purse I wonder what vile thing it “helped” her with. Sick. What is wrong with people? There is an epic amount of coughing tonight. I wonder why the concert season is in the winter, when people are sick – remnant of a past way of life, perhaps, like the idea of not starting until 8:00 in the evening, as if none of us have to work, though that’s probably why most of these people look retired. Pretty full house tonight though. The coughing is not letting up! Now Andsnes is back with the Bartok. My program is put away but I glance at my neighbor’s. It’s the Suite for Piano, Opus 14. At least his program is far enough away for me to read. I need new glasses. It’s always so dim in theaters now even before the concert starts – maybe a cost-saving measure? Zellerbach in particular. It is always great to hear Bartok. A man of integrity as well as a great artist – an argument against the whole trite notion that great artists are always “bad” people. Like Verdi that way. Though I only know anecdotes about Bartok, all admirable though. I did read that massive Verdi bio, which I foolishly carried on a plane. I don’t remember where I was going. The occasional lull in coughing. Concentrate! Andsnes plays so beautifully. I probably won’t post anything, though. I don’t really have much to say. Some of these people should have grabbed some of those lozenges from the bowl at the table in the lobby. It’s like a concerto for piano and bronchial tubes. Debussy now, Book One of Images. I think this is one of the reasons I got the Piano Series. Also someone is doing Kurtag, I think. Later. Epic coughing! It seems to be one woman in particular, sitting in the back. I’m trying to ignore it. Are her neighbors glaring? Why isn’t she leaving? I’ve heard several others leave with their coughing fits. They could at least have tried to leave quietly. Can she possibly think her hacking cough is not disrupting the entire auditorium? It sounds like a woman coughing – maybe it’s a countertenor, haha. Debussy – hard not to think of clouds and water, clouds passing reflected in water – sounds trite but he asks for it. Nothing wrong with clouds and water – why should I think they’re trite? They’re elemental and arresting. Wouldn’t have many haiku without them. Oh, intermission. As usual, the coughing stops as soon as the music does. John Marcher comes over – I didn’t know he was here. He goes back to his seat when the bell rings. I wonder if I was coherent. I often wonder that after I have conversations – I mean, not the ones in my head. I’m pretty witty there. L’esprit d’escalier. No coughing during the intermission, of course. Maybe she left? Andsnes comes out. He is imperturbable! I wonder what he thinks of the audience. Are we worse than usual? Better? God forbid. Does he pay attention to what’s going on out here in the dark? Are we encumbrance or inspiration? I find us an encumbrance – Hell is other people. There’s a reason that’s a commonplace. I do pay too much for concerts, considering how chancy they can be – we all have our ways of gambling, I guess. This part is all Chopin. I recognize the pieces but wouldn’t be able to name them – composers should always give names like Moonlight or Appassionata or something, not Waltz in F minor, Opus 70, no 2 – really, who remembers that? Outside of professional pianists. And show-offs. Hum the tune and I'll know it, I guess. . . .OK, now he’s standing up. Less coughing this time. I’m just listening. I just listen. I don’t know how many waltzes into the program we are. He stands and bows and we applaud. Also Named Patrick next to me says to me, bewildered, “Where are we?” Oh, good, I’m not the only one who doesn’t know! I don’t know; no breaks are indicated in the program for this half. Maybe this is now a Ballade? Very nice. Less coughing now. Also very nice. Just that one loud one at the start of the second half, like a warning shot letting us know – you’re not at peace yet! Like so many of those horrible neighbors I had in apartments. Hell is. . . . I’m very sleepy. I zone in and out. Goddam, who thinks 8:00 on a work night is a good time for a concert? So ridiculous. Well, let my body fold into the music. Maybe it sinks in – and gets lost in thee, like that line in Tennyson. Sinking in thee? I should memorize more poems. Something constructive to do with my brain, instead of obsessive circling. Beautiful encore. He perseveres. I wonder how I would feel about an audience like this, if I were up there playing. How much can they hear or see? The lights must be shining in their eyes. But he couldn’t miss that coughing woman. Beautiful encore again. Sure, I’m happy to stand. Now I sit, now I stand. It’s like a mass! The church of Art. Lights are up. Oh my God, this crowd is even slower than usual: move, move, move! The side aisle is less crowded – oh, I should stand aside, here's an old woman. I don’t think I stood aside quickly enough. She’s nice. She smiles. I smile. I say, “Excuse me.” Thank God I was raised right! And am so repressed! Otherwise I’d probably be in jail by now. Free room and board, along with the occasional rape, I guess. I wouldn’t like it, probably. OK, I’ve never seen the bathroom so crowded. Everyone is so so so slow tonight. Only two stalls – ridiculous. Another line to wash our hands. I hope I don't miss a train. I love walking through the streets on a cool uncrowded night – wish I could stroll, but the trains. . . . twenty minute wait if I miss it. I’m so tired. 8:00 is an idiotic start time. Maybe I should tell them again? They always send those “please give us feedback!” e-mails. OK, kill that coughing moron – a coffin for the cougher. Coffers. Do I alliterate too much? Quite the trap. Start at 7:30. My God, isn’t that obvious? 8:00? Bad on both ends. Hours before with nothing to do, and then a late night – I’ll feel this tomorrow. That last piece – what was it? It keeps going through my head in snatches. But it’s starting to bleed into recordings of it I’ve heard, whatever it was. Over and over. Whatever it is. Pink lights along the side of the Asian Art Museum. Yellowish lights on UN Plaza. Greenish lights going down to BART. At least the woman blocking the escalator was nice about moving aside. Sometimes they aren’t – why not? What is wrong with people? A rush of wind from below – a train coming? Like after that play at the Aurora (what play was it?) when I felt the wind from the tunnel below and rushed down just in time – twenty minute wait otherwise. That’s a long time late at night when you’re tired. I’m very tired. Lawyers bill clients in increments of fifteen minutes. Twenty minutes is longer. By a third. There’s a train, it’s not my train, I’m very tired. Seven minutes until the Dublin train, not too bad a wait. It’s a four-car train. Motherfucker! I hate BART and that is the worst thing about BART – short trains. Of course it’s packed even before Civic Center. Loud bad music, chasing out what's left in my head from tonight. Like coming back from vacation – airports undo any good the vacation has done. Oh, here’s a seat. I should have gone into the first car – no bicycles. Three of them are crowded in here. People are standing. No one I need to give a seat to, I guess. I hope I don’t fall asleep. Maybe I should stand so I don't. No room to stand. Goddam short trains. They still charge full price, though. What was that last piece? It all evaporates so quickly. I try to read Barnaby Rudge. I’m too tired. My noise-reduction headphones are not reducing the noise. Whose device is that – three suspects, each likely to be listening to that shit music. A phone? an iPod? I don't even know what people use anymore. bonk bonk bonk bonk – so irritating. Can’t block it out; it's too regular. My other headphones were better. They broke. Cheap plastic. Maybe I need to change the batteries in these? I give up on Barnaby Rudge. New York Review: an article about Shia and Sunni Muslims. Sectarian violence. I’m so tired. I can’t keep them straight. I can't read this either. More time lost, and the words pile up to be read. I’ll stare at random sentences. Idiotic start times. Why do I keep doing this? That last piece – what was it? I know it. I’m getting worse with names anyway. What lasts? What’s lost? Lost, lost, lost . . . .Banal, but true. The music is already bleeding away, fleeting. What do other people hear? How do they hear? Why do they hear? I don’t think I’ll post about this, I love it but don’t really have anything to say. Beautiful, though, that’s worth something (I spend too much on music). But I’m starting to write in my head and it goes around and around and around. Write it to get rid of it. Should do that more often. That Hampson concert – two years ago? Three? Still stuck in my head. Still, good to have memories of what I spend so much time and money on. . . . Always a relief to get out of BART. Talk about spending time and money on. . . .The streets can be empty but a car will always show up exactly when I need to cross. What’s that white thing in front of that bush? A huge cup from one of our fine fast-food emporia. The nastier the food, the more likely people are to litter. Right in front of my house. WTF. What is wrong with people. How odd to place it carefully down, out of the way, instead of just tossing it – so I guess that’s good. I’m so tired. 8:00 – idiotic. I won’t be able to sleep if I know it’s out here, though. Leaves are OK, but I hate trash. That old man next door who got so angry about the leaves – attacking me on Christmas Eve, had to knock him down. Twice. Over leaves. He had a car rusting in his driveway, but was obsessed with the leaves. Little golden leaves. They are a bitch to sweep up though. God, I hope I'm not getting like him. He’s probably dead now. Kind of young to have Alzheimer’s, but it happens. I’m getting worse with names. The cup: it’s only half full. I don’t know what bin to put it in. I’ll put it on top of this one and hope no stray cats knock it down. That last piece – now it’s a recording I’m hearing. It’ll say tomorrow what it was, on the site. What did we do before the Internet? Is this cup Styrofoam? Plastic? Either way, it’ll last longer than I will. Or memory, or live music. Hey, a package! Must be my new camera. I can’t look at any of this stuff now. I’m so tired. I’ll feel this tomorrow, especially in the afternoon. Afternoons are a drag anyway. Siesta time! Live music – like a drug. For a clean-living guy: it’s gambling and drugs! Flip off the switch – it’s so dark. Oh, I didn’t go upstairs to turn a light on before I turned off the downstairs lights, that's why it's so dark. Empty pockets – lozenge wrappers, random receipts. Admission ticket to the Asian. OK, at least on Thursday I can go to the Asian. Goddam 8:00 start times. V always says she’s most tired on Thursdays. Is that happening to me now? I was tired all day though. Maybe because of winter? Should I turn the heat on? It's not that cold. PG&E bills too high. They'll go down in a month or so, but still, I do turn the heat on more than I used to. I don’t remember names as well as I used to. I’m tired, it’s dark. Lights now on upstairs, turned off downstairs, keys go here, wallet goes here, handkerchiefs here, undress, put on boxers, put on T-shirt, brush, floss – should I skip flossing? No, floss, piss (where was the moon tonight? it was so bright the other morning – that Larkin poem, groping my way back to bed and so forth, I should memorize more poems), wash hands, wash face, turn off the bathroom light, set the alarm, don’t turn on TV you’re already so tired, I should cancel cable, I spend too much, I’m so tired, I’ll feel this tomorrow, pillows just so, I'm in my room (those people who see the house and say, "Is this your room?" and I say: "All the rooms are mine. It's my house" – another funny expression, "your room" for bedroom like "language" when people mean swear words: "there is language in it") and now off go the lights, at last. And now I can’t sleep.

fireworks & ashes

Going to concerts doesn’t leave much time for writing about them. It's been a busy time and I have quite a little backlog built up.

About a week ago I heard Philippe Jaroussky with the Cleveland-based Apollo’s Fire Baroque Orchestra, headed by Jeannette Sorrell, in a program of arias and instrumental works by Handel and Vivaldi. Each program held a little card advertising a free Jaroussky download; these little cards are aptly named dropcards because drop is what they did, littering the floors and corridors in Hertz Hall after the concert like the autumn leaves that had not started to fall even though it was late October because the summer heat had not gone away, and it was downright too hot that Sunday afternoon. It would have been a nice day to lie in the shade or maybe work in a garden, but not so much to be in a packed overheated concert hall, no matter how attractive the program. Also, my allergies were really bad, I guess because of the heat and subsequent confusion among the plants as to when they should release their pollens, and I had taken some meds, so there was that.


Sorrell, who conducted from the harpsichord, is petite and lively with an explosive mass of curly red hair. She addressed the audience frequently; a little too frequently for my taste, even if I hadn’t been leaning towards the slightly drugged and churlish, since most of what she said was I would think pretty much stuff most of us already knew, since many in the full house were clearly baroque aficionados (and were heading over to hear Viveca Genaux with Philharmonia Baroque at First Congregational right after this concert; in fact a friend generously offered me his ticket since after a week of constant concerts he was concerted out – and if a retired man feels that way, what hope does a working stiff like me have, so I declined with thanks). Sorrell noted that this concert was the group’s “San Francisco debut,” even though we weren’t in San Francisco, and her tone kind of indicated that she knew that but she said it anyway, which I thought was a little odd. So, for the record, it was their Bay Area debut. I’m not a big fan of little talks from the stage, though I do make occasional exceptions, no doubt to the delight of all, and since I was way off to the left side of the hall the spoken remarks sounded a bit muffled (though the music came through fine), which made them a little tiresome to me.

The group had the occasional tuning problem, which is an occupational hazard of playing early-music-style instruments, but on the whole they were fleet and glittering and did Apollo proud, and they clearly enjoyed playing for us as much as we enjoyed listening to them. There were a number of instrumental pieces interspersed with the arias, including several portrayals of tempests at sea or in the soul. Olivier Brault was the violin soloist for a Vivaldi violin concerto (in E-flat, Op. 8, No. 5, "Tempesta di Mare"), and he bobbed up and down with concentrated delight as he played, his long hair tied back in a very eighteenth-century style with a wide yellow ribbon. The concert was officially billed as “Handel and Vivaldi Fireworks,” and though there was plenty of sparkling furor, I thought that Jaroussky’s pure clear countertenor was best suited to the arias of plaintive regret. He is fairly tall and thin and has a Caravaggian face, and his body shakes slightly to his roulades in an oddly birdlike way.


The audience was quite enthusiastic and frankly started getting on my nerves more and more, since their enthusiasm led to more and more exclaiming over the music during the music. I’m thrilled that Jaroussky was singing some random woman’s favorite aria, but maybe she could hold that joy secretly in her heart instead of talking over the music? Same thing for the other random woman when he then sang her favorite aria. And I could have done without the watch-alarm obbligato in the second half.

And I was still under the influence of Simon Keenlyside’s recital a few days earlier, the magnetic fascination of which I completely failed to convey here. At least one friend who was also at both concerts was in the same mood as I was, but then he is a baritone himself and was put off by the cult of the countertenors. So, sorry, but you see how sadly it was with me, and unfortunately I felt a bit disconnected from what was really a quite enjoyable concert.


This was my first time hearing Jaroussky live. I became a big fan of his a few years back after watching the DVD of Stefano Landi’s Il Sant’Alessio, in which Jaroussky gives a memorable performance as the titular saint (also known as Saint Alexis), a fifth-century Roman patrician who announced to his wife-to-be on the day of their arranged marriage that he was putting himself in God’s hands and leaving. His family did not see him or hear of him for seventeen years, during which time he wandered as a holy beggar. The abandoned young wife of the unconsummated marriage continued to live with his parents as a daughter, and all mourned his mysterious absence from their lives. After the seventeen years he returned incognito to his father’s house, where no one recognized him, and he lived in a crawlspace under the stairs for another seventeen years as a lowly servant/dependent of the house. His identity was discovered on his deathbed, and a mysterious voice from Heaven proclaimed him a man of God.

This strange, Hawthorne-like fable (in fact Hawthorne wrote a very similar story, about a man who leaves his wife and children and lives secretly for decades apart from them) is brought to mesmerizing life by William Christie and Les Arts Florissants, with strong assistance from director Benjamin Lazar. It’s a really stunningly beautiful production; each shot looks like a baroque painting, which is probably why Jaroussky’s face always reminds me of a Caravaggio.

resurrection of the dead

I just got back from the San Francisco Symphony, where I heard Michael Tilson Thomas conduct a vibrant and heartening performance of Mahler's Symphony No 2 in C minor (often known as the "Resurrection"). The clueless bitch two seats down from me spent, as far as I could tell, the entire performance playing with various electronic devices.

O Gustav: a giant weeping for pygmies.

Britten in Berkeley 1: Tragedy

Lorin Maazel’s Castleton Festival Opera paid a visit to Berkeley this week, bringing two of Britten’s chamber operas for two performances each: The Rape of Lucretia (I was at the Friday performance) and Albert Herring (I was at last night’s performance). I had been looking forward to these performances, but found them both a bit disappointing, and not just because I was apparently one of the few in attendance who paid anything close to full price (and not just because Zellerbach is exactly the wrong hall for chamber opera, which matters less when you sit as close as I like to).

I had seen Lucretia a few years ago in a knock-out performance in Philadelphia (my reactions are here). I saw it twice and could happily have sat through it a third time. The intensity was much less at the Berkeley performance, and to make comparisons easier, it turned out this was exactly the same production (stage direction by William Kerley) that I saw back east. The first-act close, the menacing and ritualistic repetition of “good night” by Tarquin and Lucretia and her attendants, which was so powerful in Philadelphia, seemed – not quite redundant, but certainly less harrowing.

Some of the business has changed – the Female Chorus no longer glares angrily so often at the Male Chorus, for one thing. The unfortunate idea of dressing the Male and Female Chorus as sort of television evangelists was retained, though the Male Chorus (Vale Rideout, with Arianna Zukerman as the Female Chorus) threw the Bible around more than a preacher should.

I would have preferred seeing the Male and Female Chorus treated with more depth because the double narration of the opera – the Christian framework around the classical tableau – is one of the most fascinating aspects of this opera, and one of several dichotomies (male/female, Etruscan/Roman, military camp/domestic life) that the viewer has to bridge. I had some thoughts on this in my Philadelphia entry, so I won’t go into it much here. But the basic question of why good people suffer was clearly ripe for renewed interrogation in 1946, when this opera was written, and Britten and his librettist, Ronald Duncan, give us the opportunity by uniting the two main cultural traditions of Europe, the Classical and the Christian, which had either culminated in or been perverted by the murderous violence of the two world wars, and having each tradition confront a terrible act of violence.

The singers were mostly very good. Vale Rideout and Arianna Zukerman as the Male and Female Chorus were both committed, and Michael Rice as Lucretia’s husband, Collatinus, brought a lot of depth and anguish to his part. Michael Weyandt as Junius and Matthew Worth as Tarquinius were both very good, but the latter was not as subtle or complex as Nathan Gunn was in Philly. Both female attendants were also excellent – Alison Tupay was Bianca and Marnie Breckenridge, fresh off her local triumph as the Princess in Glass’s Orphee, was Lucia.

That brings us to Ekaterina Metlova as Lucretia. I thought she was the weak link in the cast, which is obviously a problem in an opera called The Rape of Lucretia. I feel the same pain in disliking her that I felt when discussing Jane Eaglen: much as I dislike what she’s doing, she’s clearly committed and trying her best; it’s just that she moves clumsily and is not a very good actress. The simple dignity and depth that Tamara Mumford had in Philadelphia were replaced by acting that was ostentatiously “operatic” in the wrong way: outward and self-dramatizing. Metlova played the first half like Dalila and the second half like Lucia; at no point did I feel she was like Lucretia.

The backstage conversations were clearly audible through much of the performance. And there was weirdness going on in the audience, too, particularly in the second half, and particularly in the front row of the far right. A large woman came and sat down in the aisle seat and a man in the row kept saying something loudly to her (this was during the performance). She kept getting up and then coming back. And during the rape scene, the blubbery child in the row – I’m guessing she was around 11, and I’m guessing it was a she based entirely on the white sweatshirt with a large picture of a patchwork heart and teddy bears that she was wearing – started laughing very loudly, and then slowly and solemnly took her right index finger and thrust it up each of her nostrils, one after the other. Shortly after that they stormed out, appalled by either the rape or their own behavior, and the rest of us could be disappointed in the performance in peace. I can’t imagine why they were there in the first place – why would anyone bring a child of that age and maturity level to something called The Rape of Lucretia?

portrait of a composer and his audience

It’s a shame that Pierre Boulez’s delightful music is not as widely known as his long series of deeply silly pronouncements (all the art of the past must be destroyed . . . blow up all the opera houses . . . Schoenberg is not pure enough . . . any musician who has not felt the necessity of the dodecaphonic language is useless). It’s difficult to believe that even the angriest revolutionary doesn’t realize that if you blow up the past it merely reforms in a more or less different guise, and that revolutions have their own logic and their own ironies that tend to develop apart from any conscious intentions of the revolutionaries involved, and it’s impossible to believe that a Frenchman born after 1789 wouldn’t realize these things. I understand that artists, in order to forge their own way, sometimes need to insist on the historical inevitability and importance of what they’re doing. And they need to shock complacent listeners into paying attention. But it’s difficult to avoid seeing Boulez’s remarks, given the frequency and the extremity of their (very dated) revolutionary rhetoric, as an attempt to position himself as the arbiter of the acceptable, the infallible Pope of a nonexistent church.

Time has brought Boulez from enfant terrible to eminence grise, and the historical inevitability of dodecaphonic language now looks as tenuous as many other historical inevitabilities of the twentieth century. That doesn’t mean I don’t still enjoy it. (If I followed the logical imperatives of historical inevitability, I guess I would now be listening exclusively to neo-Romantic music, or maybe just rock and hiphop, but fortunately being historically inevitable is not really important to me.) In fact, when Cal Performances added the Composer Portrait: Pierre Boulez concert to their schedule, I was, according to the box office person I spoke to, the first person to buy a ticket. I called twenty minutes after the tickets went on sale, and was actually worried for a moment that the concert had already sold out. I was worried about that because I am insane.

When the day of the performance arrived, I was glad I had bought a ticket in advance, because otherwise I probably would have skipped it. I couldn’t have known when I bought the ticket that I would be feeling kind of ill, or that we’d have a surprising amount of steady rain. I had also forgotten how much adjustment the previous day's “spring forward” time change takes. And I had been to two concerts the day before. Also: the Boulez concert was at 8:00 on a Monday night, which is ridiculous. I am pretty sure I was the only person in the audience who had to be in a cubicle by 8:00 the next morning.

Which brings me to the weirdness of the audience. Maybe I was simply assuming that, if there was one concert whose audience would be full of raptly attentive true believers, it would be one featuring two works by Pierre Boulez (Anthemes 2 and Derive 2). Instead . . . well, during the intermission it became clear that there were lots of rude and inattentive students there, who had been playing with their electronic toys during the performance, despite the usual announcement about turning off the toys. First I heard a very frustrated man tell a stupid-looking girl that her constant texting was incredibly distracting. She seemed dumbfounded and later I saw her actually crying, though my heart hardened when I saw that she continued texting in the second half, though possibly not during the music. Then someone told a girl behind me that the light from her device was very distracting. She said that she would “try to hide it” but she “really needed to talk to this person now and she didn’t want to fail this course.” Huh? What the hell are they teaching them over at my alma mater? So she’s going to pass just by sitting in a room, not only not paying attention, but actively disrupting the performance for others? Why can’t they restrict the rude and inattentive students to lectures, rather than forcing the paying public to sit next to them at concerts? I can only hope and assume the rude little bitch failed anyway.

And during the second piece, a short and hairy old man in the first row (he would have been next to me if I hadn’t moved over) actually spoke several times, loudly enough so that the conductor turned and glared at him. Why would you bother spending an evening at a Pierre Boulez concert if you didn’t want to pay attention to the music? And the troll’s horrible troll wife came back from intermission reeking of cigarette smoke – I could smell her disgusting stench from three seats away.

So there was lots of weird, angry energy in the room. I would gladly have skipped the whole thing if I hadn’t enjoyed the music so much. The first piece, Anthemes 2, featured Graeme Jennings on violin and John MacCallum on electronics. Jennings plays the violin, using, it seems, just about every possible technique, and the sound gets repeated and distorted and sent to different speakers around the room, where it reverberates and dies, adding a varying spatial and temporal dimension to the sound. The effect is both austere and virtuosic, sumptuous within a controlled range. The second piece, Derive 2, went in an entirely different direction, replacing the exploration of a solo instrument with eleven players (the Eco Ensemble) and a conductor (David Milnes) in a busier music. It started out with lots of squidgy little figures, which fit in almost too well with the agitated mood I was feeling. The figures keep returning in different figurations and overlapping patterns until it all starts to make intuitive sense. It was a very rich piece, superbly performed by the ensemble; it would repay repeated listening, but when are we going to get the chance to hear it again?

CMASH at Old First

Last night I trudged up to Old First Church on Van Ness Avenue because Old First Concerts was presenting CMASH, a new-music ensemble made up of soprano Ann Moss and pianist Steven Bailey. CMASH stands for Chamber Music Art Song Hybrid; they were founded in 2008 and their mission statement proclaims them “a new-music repertory group dedicated to fostering and sustaining long-term collaborative relationships between composers and performers.” There’s more, of course, including something about a “commitment to audience engagement and satisfaction” to which perhaps I should have paid a bit more attention, particularly the “audience engagement” part.

Ten minutes after the performance was supposed to start, someone came out, who was maybe someone from Old First Concerts – I only half-listen to pre-concert speeches, because I carry no cell phone or other electronic equipment to turn off, and that’s generally the only important thing these speakers have to say, and I’m cranky at having had to kill the hours until 8:00, so that any further delay just makes me impatient. He thanked the small crowd for being there, said that without us this was just another rehearsal, stuff like that. So after that pat on the head, Moss came out solo and – well, maybe her little speech, in which she repeated most of what the first speaker had said about this just being a rehearsal without us etc, came later.

She came out solo and gestured for us to rise. After a momentary hesitation, I complied, perhaps from force of habit (we were after all in a church, where you rise when the celebrant says to). She then started directing the audience in a clapping/singing/call-and-response thing, and I’m sorry, but that’s when I sat right back down, because that is why we have safe words.

Yes, it was sort of fun to listen to, in the occasional moments when I could disassociate myself from my embarrassed non-participation long enough to listen. It probably would have been fun to participate in, if I had been that person completely different from myself that I’ve always wanted to be. I was immediately plunged back into a hyper-sensitive, awkward self-consciousness of a sort I had thought I had moved past. I haven’t been so acutely conscious of the message my body language sent since the last corporate diversity seminar I was forced to sit through.

I would fold my arms across my chest and then unfold them as soon as I realized I was sending that “I’m closed off” signal. I tried to smile without breaking into hysterical laughter. I tried to avoid shifting (sign of impatience!) too often. I tried not to think of how conspicuous my non-participation was. (I was sitting in my preferred spot, in the front row, and therefore I was visible to the entire audience as well as the performers, so my non-participation was unintentionally aggressive.) I was not only awkwardly aware that I was the only one not participating, I’m hating myself for being the sort of person who just can’t do things like that.

They hate me, I hate me. . . you'd think that would bring us together. Well, maybe no one noticed or cared I was just sitting, which is worse in a way, as it reminds me that, despite my racing and painful self-consciousness, I’m actually completely unimportant to the group. It wouldn’t be the first time I was forced into a team-building activity and let down the team. And it wouldn’t be the first time my non-participation drew the rest of the group closer together.

Apparently the point was to make us aware of the importance of our role as the audience. But I am already way too aware of the role of the audience, and feel strongly that the way the audience participates is to sit there and listen. You really can’t get around that: it’s about sitting there and listening. I already ponder audiences endlessly, because while I love performances, I basically don’t like being crammed in with a lot of other people, and I don’t really like “going out” – whatever need I had to get out and mingle for the sake of getting out and mingling has pretty much left my life. So I don't need to be jogged into contemplating what audiences are for, and what they add, and, more to the point, what they take away, and whether the end result makes them worth putting up with.

You’ll note I'm assuming that audiences are mostly a more or less necessary evil – the best audience is one you don’t notice, in my opinion. And I should point out that this isn’t just some misanthropic though I hope possibly endearing quirk of mine; every single person I know who is a regular theater- or concert-goer struggles with the nature of audiences. It's a truism that, as the playwright tells us, hell is other people.

Being forced to play games to make me think about things I was thinking about anyway reminded me of having to write another silly annual review/self-evaluation for some job (didn’t the Maoists called this engaging in self-criticism or speaking bitterness or something similar?) and I said to my supervisor that one reason I hated doing these was that their only purpose was to give management an excuse not to give us raises by bringing up mistakes and faults that we’d already most likely improved, since I already was constantly evaluating what I was doing; i.e., should I have phrased that e-mail better? was there a more effective way to handle that other situation? He finally explained in patient tones that yes, I self-evaluated all the time (maybe excessively), but many people didn’t. So the evaluations were another thing that I was forced to participate in for the sake of everyone else, even though they would not benefit and could only damage me.

You’ll notice the evening kept reminding me of some of the worst, most painful aspects of corporate life. With all due respect for CMASH’s attempt at an innovative approach to the standard recital format, I’d like to suggest that any format that makes me feel I’m in forced attendance at a corporate team-building event is a format that has failed.

It was the end of an exhausting and mostly unhappy week, and I just wanted to treat myself to some live music, not be force-fed a madeleine of social humiliations past. I just wanted to listen. But that makes what I do sound too passive: because I sit there, and, to the best of my ability, I pay close attention. In other words, I was asking the performers to provide something that was going to engage me on a deeper level than most of my life, particularly the many hours of my office life, engages me.

Maybe other people did get something from the kumbaya time, but it frankly didn't make the audience any more attentive or considerate than usual: there was plenty of program-rustling and whispering, though most of it was coming from a small group in the second row on the right (it’s an audience of maybe fifty people, and you’re in clear view of the performers, and you feel you’re entitled to whisper during the songs? really?). But that's what you get when you encourage people to think that their individual experience should be imposed on everyone else, or when they're there for "community." Some of us are only there to listen to music.

The thing about silence during the performance is that it’s a profound act of respect not only to the performers, but also to fellow audience members: you are showing an awareness of their presence, and your silence demonstrates that you feel they are equal to you in importance – it’s a refusal to impose oneself on others. It’s been common for years to use “community” to refer to random genetic coincidences, but that’s a meaningless imposition of a fake bond: during a performance, silence – that is, respect, awareness – is the only form of community possible. And as a different playwright tells us, Silence is the perfectest herald of joy.

And I couldn't just move on, so to speak, when the concert finally started, because there was more: little speeches from the stage that I kept fearing were going to turn into full-blown monologues, having to wait while the lights were turned up so we were all visible, references to people and events that I didn’t know – I mean, congratulations to whoever it was that had that baby that we heard about after the intermission, but I kept feeling I had stumbled into a private party and they were just waiting for me to realize my mistake and leave. I definitely had the feeling that I was the only one in the audience who didn’t already know everyone there.

I think it’s really great if people want to hold a contemporary Schubertiad with their friends and family, but if you are selling tickets to the general public you have to expect there will be strangers who are there for diverse purposes, which could very well include being left alone to listen to music. (That phrase keeps recurring here, about being there to listen to music, because I feel the need to insist that that is, really, the only reason we're sitting in a concert hall instead of sipping a Guiness in a bar.) I half expected someone to come up to me at intermission and either confront me or suggest I just get out.

There are ways of including people – insisting they play games together, assuming that we all belong to the same set so we can refer without explanation to people who aren’t there – that really end up increasing the outsider’s sense of exclusion. And that’s always a danger anyway with small, somewhat in-bred groups, as by its nature a local new-music group would be. I’m sure exclusion wasn’t the intention; Moss seems very likeable and sincere about what she’s doing, but that just left me with an undercurrent of resentment on top of everything else, that I just couldn’t bring myself to play along with such a nice woman who was only trying to help me.

I feel guilty about even going on about this. But there it is! I also resent being jollied into submission. I’ve seldom sat at a concert feeling so deeply uncomfortable and alienated. I don’t mean alienated in an angsty teen, “I’m so much better than these phonies” way; I mean alienated as in vaguely humiliated, as if a sales attendant who is far better dressed than I have ever been had just sidled up to me to suggest in gentle but insinuating tones that perhaps I would be more comfortable at a different type of establishment.

Anguished awareness of revived and relived failures and humiliations as in a drowning man’s last moments of consciousness aside, I enjoyed the music.

Moss has a clear, beautiful soprano, which can get loud without losing its purity. Bailey is a poetic pianist who, as far as I could tell since the music was brand-new, brought out what there was to bring out. The piano accompaniments on a whole seemed to stick to a fairly mezzoforte range, but that’s something I only thought about later; the experience of the songs was quite varied.

The first piece was Matthew O’Malley’s setting of Caliban’s famous speech (“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises”). O’Malley was the only composer not there in person. I really enjoyed this piece, and though I can’t say it took any unexpected turns that gave me new insight into the passage, that might be because I was already so familiar with the passage. Setting familiar poetry has its own challenges, and obviously the familiarity – the stand-aloneness – of the words is one of them. Very lovely solemn peals at the end, leading up to the delicacy of Caliban crying to dream again.

The pieces that followed were all song cycles. First was Liam Wade’s Silver Apples, based on four poems about the moon (the moon is the poet’s friend!) by Robert Louis Stevenson, Poe, Yeats, and Lisa DeSiro. Moss managed throughout all the songs to articulate the words so that they were largely intelligible without reference to the texts in the program. Wade’s settings had a playful quality (particularly, if I’m remembering correctly, in the ragtime-ish setting of Poe’s Eldorado) that brought out the child-like qualities that can be revived by playing in, or just standing in the light of, the moon.

That was followed by Kurt Erickson’s Chicago Songs, a setting of four different poems by Carl Sandburg (the first one, I Sang to You and the Moon, is repeated at the end, as a fifth song). So here’s another difficulty for composers in selecting poetry: not everyone is going to respond to what you respond to, which means that the words you chose but didn't write will interfere with appreciation of the music you did write. In other words, I’m not a big Sandburg aficionado; I find he is to Whitman as Sexton is to Plath, clumping somewhat inelegantly and obviously down the trailblazed path. I’m also not sure that Sandburg’s swaggering men and rough tough women are best presented in a pure, clear soprano – on the other hand, maybe the manlier tones of a baritone would only make them seem even more artificial than they already are. All that aside, there were certainly effective touches in both the words and the music, and I was quite moved by the fifth number (the repetition of I Sang to You and the Moon, though I think – I might be wrong about this – it had a different setting from its first appearance).

After the intermission, which I spent tensely reading an article about Afghanistan in the New York Review of Books, waiting to snap at anyone who came up to me, though in fact everyone around me was catching up with each other, came my favorite set of the evening, Beautiful Things by Miriam Miller. I liked the way her title made us aware of the category of “the beautiful” and how that consciousness carries with it a sense of fragility as well as irony. I guessed from reading these four poems (Anna Wickham’s The Cherry Blossom Wand, Harold Monro’s Overheard on a Saltmarsh, Edward Thomas’s Snow, and Charlotte Mew’s The Pedlar) even before I found the information in the program that they all dated from the early part of the twentieth century, after the Victorians but before the Modernists: they share the aesthetic self-awareness of the period, the delicate Puvis de Chavannes tints, the touch of Japonism, the more refined approach to Victorian staples such as sentimental children or goblins or final partings. Miller brought out interesting things in these fairly obscure poems, writing music that was in keeping with their moods without resorting to period-piece gestures. This is the set I would most like to hear again.

Finally we had Rise and Fall, the oldest (2007) of these pieces, by the best-known composer of the evening, Jake Heggie. It’s a setting of four poems by Gene Scheer, each inspired by a different object from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that cumulatively suggest a woman’s life. The music was fluidly lyrical and inflected with an aura of sensuality or spirituality (or both), and Scheer’s poems are fine, but I bring to any Scheer/Heggie collaboration my experience of some of their other collaborations (including To Hell and Back, which I found an interesting idea, uneven in execution, with a shallow and simplistic libretto, and Three Decembers, which I found unconvincing and fairly forgettable); I found the music of those earlier works pleasant but I do tend to enter these things through the words, and though I’ve admired lots of Scheer’s work (the libretto to An American Tragedy and the parts I've heard of his World War II song cycle) these earlier pieces are not among them. Setting all that aside, I thought this particular piece was fine, but also I think I simply do not connect with their view of women’s lives, which I find a little too Eat-Pray-Love and Oprah-ready – a little too self-conscious of and smug about what they feel is their spiritual evolution.

So that was the concert. After the applause died away and as the lights came all the way up I slipped out the side and went downstairs through Fellowship Hall to the men’s room. When I crossed back through the lobby on my way out I glanced back inside the sanctuary, where everybody seemed to be having a lively chat. I left along with an old woman with a lot of bags in her hands, though maybe she wasn't a concert-goer but just a homeless person who had come in to use a clean restroom. And then I started the trek back to the Civic Center BART station.

Did I enjoy the music and the performances? Yes. Will I be on the lookout for further pieces by Miriam Miller? Yes. Do I like the concept of CMASH? On the whole. Would I attend another CMASH concert? Let me get back to you on that one.

random previews: opera

The San Francisco Opera season is well underway, but the one genuinely exciting, do-not-miss production is coming up in a few weeks: Karita Mattila in The Makropulos Case. As for the rest of the season, it doesn’t exactly heat the blood. For a while I thought Gockley’s aim was to turn the local house into the Met Lite, but at this point I’m thinking we should be so lucky, given the Met’s more adventurous repertory and staging in the last few years. We’re eating their dust out here in the West, not that I think the majority of the local audience minds. They seem quite in tune with Gockley’s advocacy of – well, let’s try for something neutral between “beloved classics” and “exhausted warhorses” – the more familiar works in the repertory, sung by already well-established names.

Anyone in search of anything more adventurous or challenging than People You’ve Heard Of, In Works You’ve Already Heard (or even those just searching for novelty) is out of luck. Gockley and the bulk of the San Francisco audience seem perfectly suited to each other. That’s not a compliment. Any potential audience members intrigued by works like Le Grand Macabre or St Francois are once again left to fend for themselves out there in the avant-garde wilds. Thank goodness for DVDs! What we're getting here are brand-name works presented in a more or less plush and traditional way. Nothing here is going to frighten the horses. Going to the opera in San Francisco now isn’t like going to the Museum of Modern Art; it’s like going to Bloomingdale’s.

By the way, I don’t really buy the claims that what San Francisco Opera is currently doing is “all about the voice”; everyone says that these days casting the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works is difficult to impossible, whereas we’re living in a golden age for Handel and Rossini singing. So are we getting Radamisto or La Donna del Lago? We are not. We’re getting inadequate productions of the big Verdi, Puccini, and Wagner works, because a large segment of the audience isn’t interested in anything unfamiliar and no one is interested in convincing them that new stuff can be fun and engaging.

Yes, Aida and Madama Butterfly are great works, and there’s no disgrace in presenting them, but for a veteran of the opera house there isn’t a lot of urgency in hearing them; that’s the thing about Top 40 programming – sooner or later, and probably sooner, you’re going to get another chance to hear that piece. Yet opera is a strange and addictive drug: a few months ago I looked up the performance dates of Aida for a friend, and suddenly was strangely excited at the thought of hearing the opera – Aida, of all things, an opera that has never interested me much outside of Leontyne Price’s involvement with it.

I ended up feeling I didn’t really need to pay those prices for another Aida, though Zajick was definitely a temptation. It turns out to be just as well, since I could have written the reviews without seeing it: the Zandra Rhodes designs were eye-catching but didn’t always work well, and the cast was vocally uneven. (I had seen Zandra Rhodes’s production of the Pearl Fishers and though I loved the colors I thought the setting was too cartoony.) Sung drama is the most basic form of drama, and an art form that has survived in varying forms for centuries deserves an audience that thinks of it as something more than candy-colored camp.


As for the rest of the season, I enjoyed Werther; and though Nozze di Figaro is one of my favorite operas, I loathe this production, which I’ve already seen in two different revivals (my mostly negative thoughts on that 2006 revival are here, and it was actually less vulgar than the first); I love Madama Butterfly, but feel I’ve seen it enough for a while. I did spring for a ticket to Cyrano, because I’ve always admired Domingo and the only other time I’ve heard him live was in Herodiade. And then there’s the Janacek; I assume we have Mattila’s star power to thank for bringing us one of this great composer’s fascinating works. I honestly don’t understand why he isn’t as popular as Puccini – to me he has that same kind of emotional directness and melodic richness. And Jenufa has one of the few happy endings I find convincing, even inspiring. So that’s the one can’t-miss for me this season.

I’m not excluding the upcoming June Ring Cycle from that assessment, either; I hoped that Walkure last June would guide and convince me one way or the other, but apparently I got the vocal off-night, which seems to be how these things go for me (so if I end up not buying tickets, you can be assured you’re in for a treat!). The production itself is not very interesting (my thoughts on Walkure are here, and in there is a link to my thoughts on the Rheingold, which I saw in both DC and here).

Fortunately other local groups are taking up the operatic slack for those who maybe don’t want to pay hundreds of dollars for their hundredth Butterfly:

On October 30 and 31, Urban Opera is presenting a Purcell pasticcio, the Witch of Endor. They’re a new group and though I missed their previous presentation, Dido and Aeneas, it was highly praised.

Cal Performances is presenting Lorin Maazel's Castleton Festival Opera in two Britten works, The Rape of Lucretia on March 24 and 25 and Albert Herring on March 26 and 27.

Ensemble Parallele is presenting Philip Glass’s Orphee, one of his Cocteau operas, on February 26 and 27, as a follow-up to their kick-ass Wozzeck.

Berkeley West Edge Opera is in a nifty new space in El Cerrito and has some interesting programs, starting with Handel’s Xerxes on November 13, 19, and 21, followed by an adaptation of Carmen called the Carmen Fixation and a new opera by Clark Suprynowicz and Amanda Moody called Caliban’s Dreams.

Festival Opera hasn’t announced its 2011 productions as far as I know. For a while they were doing one warhorse and one more unusual work (like Rorem’s Our Town or Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream) but lately it’s been two warhorses. I hope they resume their more adventurous ways. But even if they don’t, they present solid productions in a nice smaller theater, at a much lower cost than San Francisco Opera.

The other big opera excitement for me is the James Levine 40th anniversary CD and DVD sets. Cumulatively the sets are expensive, though the per-disc price is quite low. (And by not buying tickets to Aida, Butterfly, and Figaro, I more than covered the expense.) And click on those links and look at what you get! What I really love and admire here is the commitment to new or “difficult” works (there was a time when Mozart and Wagner were considered difficult. . . ). Two recordings each of Wozzeck and Lulu, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Les Troyens and The Great Gatsby. . . everyone will have his or her particular jewels here, but anyone who doesn't find this collection thrilling . . . uh, is probably a big fan of the current programming at San Francisco Opera. I haven’t watched any of the DVDs yet, and have only listened to about half of the CDs, but I’m thrilled with the set and can’t recommend it too highly. My one complaint so far: the packaging is flimsy and difficult to use. I almost wrecked the DVD box trying to get the tray of discs out, and removing the CDs means reaching into the cardboard envelope and sliding them out by touching the disc – so a fail on the packaging, but the recordings are sheer gold.

I Tiresias, old man with wrinkled dugs / Perceived the scene, and foretold the rest – . . .

So here was how my Friday evening went:

Having hours and hours to kill after work and before curtain time, I walked from the Financial District down to the Westfield Mall for dinner. I went to the Thai place in the food court (they probably have some more upscale-sounding name for that area, since this is the mall with Bloomingdale’s, but a food court is what it is) – I think it’s called Coriander. They now offer brown rice, so I had brown rice. For my two items, still trying to be healthy, I picked the mixed vegetables and cashew chicken. The mixed vegetables (and I’ve had this before, so I don’t know if this was a server making a mistake or some new stingy policy) turned out to be three smallish stalks of broccoli – really, two and a half smallish stalks of broccoli. Speaking of really – you’re stiffing me on the broccoli and carrots? Really? It looked more like a garnish than a side order of vegetables. The cashew chicken was tasty but I think, if only for technical reasons, there should have been at least one actual cashew in it. So it was OK, but I’m not inclined to hurry back there.

Having hours still to kill, I walked over to Macy’s to check out Holiday Lane, which I have to admit I love in a childish happy way. So I find Holiday Lane for my first visit this year, walk around thoroughly inspecting all the decorated trees and Christmas paraphernalia, and . . . it’s OK. It’s all stuff I’ve seen before, and though I wasn’t disappointed, I wasn’t excited either.

So that brings me to Jerry Springer: The Opera.

The large cast is very enthusiastic and committed, and that’s not a euphemism for untalented, because there are a lot of terrific voices in the cast (all of them brutally and crudely amplified). I particularly liked Jonathan Reisfeld as the disturbed, reptilian set-up guy in the first half and Satan in the second half, though singling him out isn’t meant to take away from the others. The basic joke, which is summed up in the title, has lots of potential: what we think of as low and crass, poured into what we think of as high art (though of course opera is by its nature more mixed and sensationalistic than, say, chamber music).

But the music isn’t “operatic” enough for the contrast to work really well; it’s through-composed (though oddly Springer doesn’t sing – I could go either way on whether that's a reference to Pasha Selim in Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail as well as on whether "this is my Jerry Springer moment, and I don't want it to die" is a reference to Goethe's Faust, looking for the moment so beautiful he will beg that it never pass away) and the music is fun and effective, and there are some amusing take-offs on baroque passion music, but it pretty much has a Broadway/pop sound, and that’s just not far enough from the Springer world for the high/low joke to pack the punch it might.

There are plentiful warnings that the show is shocking and no refunds will be given to the offended, but . . . well, I’m wondering if anyone is actually offended, and if so, what they were expecting from something called Jerry Springer: The Opera.

It’s almost comical how easily shocked and offended I am in real life – for instance, I was shocked and a bit offended that Duane Kuiper’s offhand remark last spring that Giants’ baseball is “torture” has turned into a team motto; since a vast number of Americans have apparently decided, in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, and in defiance of simple decency and the better traditions of America, that torture “works” and is OK for Americans (to give, though not to receive), it’s disturbing to see it become a marketing opportunity for a baseball team.

But as for what is shocking in the theater – well, I’ve been reading the Elizabethans/Jacobeans and the Greeks since I was ten, and there is, trust me, absolutely nothing you can put on stage that is going to shock me: incest, pedophilia, mutilation, cannibalism, rape, blasphemy, various fetishes . . . they're all really just a starting point. If you think you're delivering a shock by mentioning these things, and that they're sufficient on their own, then as I start waiting for variations on the theme that never arrive, I start feeling a bit bored.

And I’m not trying to hide shock under an attempted veneer of sophistication, in the manner of those people who say things like, “Well, honestly, profanity is such a bore, isn’t it?” What I mean is that if one character threatens to fuck another character up the ass with barbed wire, even after the first time, let alone the third or fourth, I’m thinking, Well, in the last two hours I thought something similar about four people on the train, six on the two-block walk to the theater, and at least ten right now, and I’m in a pretty good mood, for me. Is that all ya got?

Maybe I’m just a little too in touch with my simmering, festering inner rage.

But I chuckled pleasantly along, and laughed at the Ku Klux Kick-Line (executed, like all the dances, with more good spirits than precision), but then I also laughed when I saw one of those in O Brother Where Art Thou. And I used to subscribe to the Weekly World News, back when they had a print edition (how sweetly old-fashioned of me!) and though I haven’t seen that many episodes of South Park (since I don’t get the stations that show it) . . . you get the picture. Nothing here is anything new – it’s the circus sideshow. It’s the Elephant Man, though the musical doesn’t develop the characters enough to give you the strange poetic side you get in Lynch’s great film – in fact, watching this musical is pretty much like watching the actual Springer show: we’re there to laugh at the freaks, and then at the end there’s a little lesson about accepting people or being different or something. I never saw more than a few minutes of the Springer show, but it’s already feeling sort of quaint – oh, remember when that show was on? Hey, remember when people used to say “talk to the hand?”

In one of the few sermons I remember at all from childhood, the priest made the too often neglected point that sin wasn’t just about sex – that just because society has decided that divorce or living together without marriage is not a sin (yeah, I’m old enough so those were both subjects discussed in hushed tones, and old enough to remember when social justice was still something mainstream society pretended to care about), therefore there is no such thing as sin. Because there are plenty of things that still should be seen as sins, and as more serious ones – the way we turn our back on the poor and the sick, for instance. And while JS the O brings in the religious element (the whole second half is in Purgatory and Hell, where Jerry has to hold one of his shows for Satan, because Satan wants an apology from Jesus), it's all on such a basic level, as if the mere idea of Jesus on a talk show is enough (again, haven't these people ever seen South Park? and even if this musical possibly originated the idea, it's now a pop culture pervasive). The whole second half felt really padded to me, with too much time spent on setting up things that didn’t really need to be set up (like getting Springer to agree to hold the show in hell).

There’s such an embarrassment of riches right now when it comes to things Americans should be angry about and ashamed of, and there’s nothing in this show that’s going to make the audience aware of any of those things, or that will make the audience question itself. I’m fine with a fun evening of naughtiness, but if you’re going to make a big deal, as this show does, about how it’s going to “shock and challenge your perceptions” (I’m quoting the playbill), then I’m going to expect something that is, you know, if not shocking, at least challenging. Sparklers are fun, but don't tell me there's going to be a huge fireball and then just light a sparkler. And though a chorus singing “dip me in chocolate and feed me to the lesbians” might be kind of funny the first time, it doesn’t really get funnier when it’s repeated. And repeated. And repeated.

Certainly the audience didn’t seem challenged, though it certainly was entertained. There’s a raffishly fun midnight-showing-of-Rocky-Horror atmosphere about the whole thing, though at the point when the midnight audiences started being full of people who had heard about this thing and figured since they were cool, despite living in the suburbs, they should be there. Of course jerks ended up sitting right behind me, a pack of pasty-faced aging bitches of all genders (note to V: they were teachers, so you know the type I’m talking about). There’s a very long intermission (guys, about that half hour intermission which you claim is necessary because the theater has such tiny bathrooms: you’re already opening the door into the alley during intermission – put two port-a-potties in there and get things moving!) and I was more or less forced to listen to their blather (“oooh, you’ll simply love Tuscany!”) but then they started talking throughout the performance.

I wasn’t expecting hushed silence, but I also didn’t need a constant, loud commentary on the stage action, especially when it’s as stupid, obvious, and frankly inaccurate as this one was. This was not the occasional whisper, but continued talking. There was no place to move to, and besides I didn't feel that I should have to move because of their obnoxious and inconsiderate behavior. I told the worst offender to shut up. After the show, she attempted to reprimand me. I love it when rude people get indignant when they’re called on their rudeness. She actually poked me. I was furious. So I repeated my request to her to shut up, adding a number of the words we’d just been hearing a lot of, and a few we hadn’t heard enough of. And there it was – my Jerry Springer moment! I truly regret not hitting her in the face with a chair.

And I’m sure she walked away thinking there was something wrong with me, and without questioning her own rude, stupid behavior or unjustified sense of entitlement. So what was she getting out of this show, besides a little laugh at the freak show and a smug feeling that she was so adventurous for being there? I don’t want to inflate what I was expecting from this show, or to leave the impression that I’m blaming the show for not turning our eyes into our very soul, there to see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct, even though the people presenting it seem to think that's a possibility. It’s a perfectly pleasant evening (run-ins with stupid entitled bitches aside, though those are too common to be of much significance, and were only a fraction of the evening anyway), though it drags a bit.

If you’re in the mood to go, go. It's there for another week, but it wouldn't surprise me if it were extended. I’m giving it a hearty “meh” . . . . I’m just not inclined to be either shocked or titillated by things like bisexuality or diaper fetishes. Sorry to sound humorless, but what shocks and offends me are things like our on-going cruel and illegal wars of aggression, our heedless destruction of the environment, our lack not only of economic justice but of concern about economic justice, and . . . you can supply your own favorite American corruption. Dip that in chocolate and feed it to the lesbians!

Sorry, JM. I wanted to love it, but it was only like. I just found it less than the sum of its parts. Though I do agree with you that it’s more exciting and challenging than most of what San Francisco Opera is currently doing. But then shouldn’t we set the bar a bit higher than that?

So that was my evening. I thought it was . . . OK. The second Giants game in this round of the playoffs had let out around the same time. When the muted crowd filled the train in the last two San Francisco stops, I didn’t even need to ask if the team had won. Clearly this was not the follow-up they had hoped for to Lincecum’s brilliant first-game win. It was eleven innings of back and forth, only to end in a last-minute loss for the home team. Torture!